On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 02:57:08PM -0500, Matt Garman wrote: > On Tue, Jun 28, 2005 at 01:28:43PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > What's the current box? I mean, I've got one that's doing about > > that without breaking a sweat, and it's about 7 years old. A PII > > (*any* PII) would be enough for this with enough RAM, and you can > > spend the money you'd spend on the new box on drives and fans > > instead. > > The current box is an nforce2 board, Athlon XP1700 and 512 MB RAM. > > Plenty of muscle in the processor-memory area. I meant to > underscore the part of my question about the *storage* subsystem > (mainly the disk controller). > > The current box has no SATA, only on-board PATA. I'm kind of > thinking that I'd like to run hardware RAID5. SCSI is just too > expensive, and hardware RAID for PATA is getting harder to find, as > it gets ousted by SATA. > > Based on the feedback I've received so far, I now think I want to > build a "little" (Soekris, mini-ITX, etc) OpenBSD box for my > firewall/gateway/NAT, and the current box will become just a > fileserver/source repository/backup server. > > So, still, the question remains: what do folks recommend as "good" > hardware for hard disk controllers?
At the risk of being annoying, go back and look at your *requirements* again. You're specifying a file-server function for video-on-demand. Which means you need to manage to pump 10-20 megabytes *per minute* for a typical avi application, and about 50 megabytes per minute for DVD. That's less than a megabyte per second, which isn't exactly massive. Pretty much anything would do; you'll want space much more than speed, and a backup method that can handle large amounts of data. Which means you're probably back to fans and drives again, and whatever controller is handy and supported, and maybe a a couple of removable device trays to handle the backups. (Or since this stuff probably seldom changes and seldom rotates, just burn stuff off to some format of DVD file-store, and don't worry about maintaining an active backup for the shared files.) -- The light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train. It is muzzle-flash.
